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Humphrey Ocean was born Humphrey Anthony Erdeswick Butler-Bowdon, on 22 June 1951 in Sussex, England. He went to Ampleforth College and then spent two years at Tunbridge Wells School of Art, going on to do a Foundation Course at Brighton College of Art and DipAD Painting at Canterbury College of Art.

In 1988 Ocean travelled to Northern Brazil with the American anthropologist Stephen Nugent, a lecturer at the University of London, eager to expose colonial caricatures of the region. Their subsequent book, Big Mouth: The Amazon Speaks, was published by Fourth Estate (HarperCollins) in 1990, and features evocative illustrations of Brazil. In 1999 the National Maritime Museum commissioned Ocean to paint a picture of modern maritime Britain. Throughout the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century, Ocean's paintings were exhibited in many of the leading museums in the United Kingdom.

In 2002, Ocean was Artist-in-Residence at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, culminating in how's my driving, an exhibition linking 17th-century Dutch genre paintings with south London suburbia.[3] That year he was awarded an honorary fellowship by Canterbury College of Art where he had been a student between 1970-1973.[4] In 2009 he worked on an Artangel project Life Class: Today's Nude directed by Alan Kane, shown on Channel 4 television.

"Working swiftly in gouache on large sheets of paper in his studio, Ocean paints his sitters, including family members, friends and professional acquaintances, in simple forms and bold colours. The project has an obsessive character that is compelling and, when seen together, the portraits are an exuberant display of the artist's love of painting, colour and people. The sitters have shared the experience of sitting for a portrait, but Ocean has illuminated something unique about each person-how they tilt their head or how they wear their shirt - with an immediacy that tethers the image to the day they visited the studio."

In 2017 Ocean exhibited Dot Book 1 in Drawing Together at the Courtauld Gallery London curated by Dr Ketty Gottardo and Dr Ben Thomas who wrote:

"Humphrey Ocean’s Dot Book also represents a type of artistic wayfaring, on a local scale, as it could be described as recording a notional trip to the supermarket where it becomes ‘impossible to get to Sainsbury’s’ because there are so many arresting motifs to discover along the way which prompt the thought ‘I like that and I want to tell somebody I saw that’. However, this is not a case of taking a line for a walk but of a series of vivid illuminations registered, as it were, at thirty miles an hour throughthe windscreen of a family estate car. The unremarkable objects, logos and snatched views of corners of suburbia collected together in this album of precise, crisply executed drawings are all 'perfectly ordinary' (to use the title of one of Ocean's exhibitions)."